With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the
price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Monday, August 08, 2016

US resident and Turkish expatriate Fethullah Gülen has been
fingered as a coup plotter by the Turkish regime. It's hard to
know exactly who was behind the events in Turkey earlier this
month but Gülen certainly has an interesting background. In 2012,
when Gülen was still reckoned as an ally of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
he was discussed at length in a New Yorker profile of
Erdoğan. Citing the work of indicted Turkish journalist Ahmet
Şık, author Dexter
Filkins writes:

Gülen is considered one of Erdoğan’s most powerful allies but
is reviled and feared by much of Turkey’s population. Born in
either 1938 or 1941—publications distributed by his organization
cite both dates—Gülen fled to the United States in 1999, as
Turkish authorities were preparing to arrest him, for “trying to
undermine the secular system.” He now lives in Saylorsburg,
Pennsylvania, in the Poconos, and has emerged as the leader of
one of the world’s most important Islamic orders, surpassed only
by the Muslim Brotherhood in its reach and influence. His public
message, in the books and glossy pamphlets his acolytes
distribute, is almost entirely apolitical, but his critics
suspect that his ambitions are deeply political.

Gülen’s followers operate a network of schools in a hundred and
thirty countries. They also run a network of for-profit
college-prep courses, which some Turks say earns tens of
millions of dollars in annual revenue. (A prominent Gülenist in
Turkey told me that the courses were not that profitable.)
Turkish businessmen donate money to build Gülenist schools in
countries whose markets they are trying to enter, and the
schools serve as beachheads of good will. According to the
movement’s followers, Turkish businessmen who are Gülenists
often make deals with one another, sometimes in Turkey,
sometimes in faraway lands that have nonexistent or weak
governments. In person, Gülenists often come across as amalgams
of Dale Carnegie and Christian missionaries: clean-cut, polite,
and relentlessly cheerful.

In Turkey, Gülen’s followers own the newspaper Zaman and
the TV channel Samanyolu, which editorialize on behalf of the
A.K. Party and the Ergenekon prosecutions. (While Erdoğan
himself is not believed to be a Gülenist, President Gül is said
to be one, as are several other senior members of the
government.) Gülen is thought to have between two and three
million followers in Turkey, including as many as sixty members
of parliament—about ten per cent of the total.

The Gülenists insist that the organization is too diffuse to
function as a political movement. But many Turks say that the
Gülenists have ambitions and that these may or may not include
Erdoğan. A former member of parliament who was once a confidant
of Erdoğan’s told me that, in 1999, he met Gülen in
Pennsylvania. Gülen, he said, told him that he had a
twenty-five-year plan to take control of the Turkish state, and
that this would be accomplished by a group of followers he
referred to as “the Golden Generation.” “There isn’t any
question that Gülen wants political power,” the former
legislator told me. (A spokesman for Gülen denied that he had
ever advocated “regime change.”)

The most widely held perception in Turkey is that the Gülenists
have taken control of the Turkish National Police—and that they
are behind the arrests in the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases.
James Jeffrey, a former Ambassador to Turkey, wrote in a cable
to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that at least part of that
proposition appeared to be true: “The assertion that the T.N.P.
is controlled by the Gülenists is impossible to confirm, but we
have found no one who disputes it.”

Gülen has cultivated some powerful friends in the United States.
When U.S. officials were trying to expel him to face criminal
charges in Turkey, he was able to call on Graham Fuller, a
former senior official in the C.I.A., to help him remain. When
he applied for permanent residency, Morton Abramowitz, another
former Ambassador to Turkey, wrote a letter on his behalf.
Fuller’s relationship with Gülen, in particular, has prompted
conspiracy theories in Turkey about the C.I.A.’s involvement in
Gülen’s rise.

(Abramowitz
also teamed up with neo-con Eric
S. Edelman, another Jewish former US ambassador to Turkey, to rise to
Gülen's defense in 2014 in a Washington
Post op-ed). In 2013, The
Economist also took note of a possible Israeli
dimension in the Gülen-Erdoğan split: "A source of enduring
speculation is why Mr Erdogan has chosen this moment to go after
the Gulenists. The most likely answer is that Mr Erdogan wanted
them to show their hand well before the presidential elections. An
increasingly paranoid prime minister is said to believe that a
'Gulen-Israel axis' is bent on unseating him. His suspicions were
fuelled by Mr Gulen’s very public criticism of Turkey’s rupture
with Israel in 2010."

Earlier this month, just days after the attempted coup, Raphael
Ahren wrote a piece
in the Times of Israel mentioning Gülen at length.
He writes:

[Efrat] Aviv, who teaches at Bar-Ilan’s Middle Eastern
studies department and is a fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for
Strategic Studies, has done extensive research into the moderate
Islamic Gülen movement and its connection to Israel and the global
Jewish community.

“Gülen sees great importance in disseminating tolerance because of
the fact that the world is a global village, and it is imperative
to lay the foundation for communication without making
distinctions between Christians, Jews, Atheists or Buddhists,” she
wrote.

“Because of this approach, of perceiving dialogue as both a
religious and a moral-national-social obligation, Gülen met with
countless leaders and key people from the three religions during
the 1990s. He met with Jewish leaders, both secular and religious,
inside and outside of Turkey, in order to promote dialogue between
Judaism and Islam.”

In the late 1990s, the reclusive imam met at least twice with
senior delegations from the Anti-Defamation League, which at the
time was headed by Abraham Foxman, according to Aviv.

“Gülen talked about his moderation regarding Islam, the Jews,
Israel, and expressed reasonable and non-extremist views,” Kenneth
Jacobson, who currently serves as the ADL’s deputy national
director, recalled in 2005 about his first personal encounter with
Gülen in New Jersey. “It was a very good meeting, very friendly.”

Jacobson’s second meeting with Gülen took place in 1998 at Gülen’s
initiative — and at his Istanbul residence — and was also attended
by then-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American
Jewish Organizations Leon Levy, Aviv writes.

“We met, and it was another pleasant encounter. We were given
gifts,” Jacobson recalled, adding that Gülen reiterated his
message of moderation. “He presented himself as someone that cares
about moderation in Turkey and cares about a moderate Islam and as
someone interested in good relations with Israel and the Jews.”

In 1998, Gülen met with Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi Eliyahu
Bakshi Doron in Istanbul, a televised visit that came about at
the initiative of the cultural attaché in the Israeli consulate.
“This was the first time that a chief rabbi came on an official
visit from Israel to Turkey, and the second visit of a chief
rabbi in a Muslim country,” according to Aviv.

Israel’s consul-general to Istanbul at the time, Eli Shaked,
participated in the meeting.

“The Israeli Foreign Ministry thought that a meeting with Gülen
could help quell the hatred and resistance to Israel and/or
Jews, and therefore they authorized it,” Aviv wrote.

Israelis consider the Mavi Marmara a watershed point in
Israeli-Turkish relations, despite gradual difficulties that had
set in the relationship up to that point. Israel has recently
patched things up with Turkey, more or less. But one
relationship was permanently damaged and the Mavi Marmara played
a major part in its unraveling. This is the relationship of
Prime Minister, now President, Erdogan and Gulen. The two had
been close in terms of political collaboration, even though
Gulen was all the while in the United States and even though he
does not represent a political party but a broad social and
educational movement. When asked by a journalist about the Mavi
Marmara and the Gaza flotilla, Gulen condemned the initiative,
arguing for Israel’s sovereignty and urging that support for
Gaza ought to be channeled through the state authority ...

He also recognizes Israel, enough to have distanced himself from
Erdogan’s position on Gaza and the flotilla ... I believe Israel owes a debt of gratitude to a principled
Muslim voice that recognized its sovereignty, at severe cost.

Given Fethullah Gülen's pro-Israel bona fides is it any
wonder that his star seems to be rising in the West and the New
York Times has given him a platform for him to profess
his innocence and to critique Erdoğan as "an autocrat who is
turning a failed putsch into a slow-motion coup of his own against
constitutional government"? You can read Gülen's
2010 remarks on the Mavi
Marmara massacre in the Wall Street Journal.

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